There are many things to be said about Tucker Carlson’s remarkable interview with Mike Huckabee, too many to say all at once. So I’m going to take my time to say them, and say them in bite-sized portions.

There’s a distinction often made in ancient Greek philosophy that’s useful here, between virtue and skill. A virtue is a specifically moral disposition to thought and action, like honesty or justice. A skill is a pragmatically useful but morally neutral sort of know-how, like knowing how to play the guitar or ride a bike or swim. The possession of a skill is not the possession of virtue, and virtues in turn aren’t reducible to the possession of a skills or sets of skills. They’re just categorially different things. That said, both virtues and skills are objects of praise, just not the same kind of praise. They’re both achievements, just achievements of different kinds.

Man I met on the street in Hebron, July 2017. “Show them that we are human,” he said, asking me to display the photo. I was tempted to tell him it wouldn’t help, but I promised to display the photo.

The distinction has particular relevance here. Liberals have been reluctant to praise Carlson because they think he’s immoral. He is immoral, but that’s not the only relevant factor in play. Carlson clearly has a skill or set of them that virtually all mainstream journalists seem to lack: he knows how to find good interview subjects, knows how to get them to agree to an interview, knows what questions to ask them, knows how to ask the right follow-up question (or at least some of them), and knows how to sell the product.

This is a hell of a lot more than the average mainstream journalist knows how to do. So it’s a red herring for these clods to tell us that we shouldn’t be praising Carlson because he’s immoral. Correct, we shouldn’t. We should draw the distinction between being a good journalist and being a good person, praise Carlson for the former, blame him for the latter, but point out that in his former capacity he has a lot to teach these feckless critics.

In other words, Tucker Carlson may be an asshole–he lacks the virtues of honesty or justice–but he’s a better journalist than most of them are. And contrary to a lot of blather, there’s no inconsistency between being a good journalist and being an asshole. Most mainstream journalists are at the end of the day just assholes of another variety anyway. They just happen to be unskilled assholes with a very high opinion of themselves.

Checkpoint into Old City Hebron, required exclusively of Palestinians or visitors entering “as” Palestinians even if residents of the Old City. Not required of Jews, who have unrestricted rights of movement in the Old City regardless of provenance or residence.

I can’t claim to have spent a huge amount of time hobnobbing with the mainstream press corps in Israel, but I have met some of them. I had an extended conversation with NPR’s Daniel Estrin on Salahuddin Street in the middle of the Aqsa riots of 2017, and was introduced to Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg at the American Colony Hotel during the summer of 2015 (when he was in the middle of writing this). Back home in Jersey, I’ve spent time on at least one interactive Zoom call with Jodi Rudoren where I interacted with her, however briefly. That may not be back stage access, but it’s not nothing. It’s just enough to tell you that all three of the mainstream journalists I met on this beat were assholes, whether they have Carlson’s reputation for it or not.

It could not have escaped either Estrin or Goldberg or Rudoren, or any of their compatriots at The New York Times or The Washington Post, or any other mainstream outlet, that Mike Huckabee was a frequent visitor to Jerusalem, Hebron, and the West Bank settlements, and that it would have been child’s play to invite him to Jerusalem for an interview on the topics Carlson raised. Any one of them could have thought of this, and any one of them could have done it, but none of them did.

I knew of Huckabee’s comings and goings, and I’m not a professional journalist, so they couldn’t have known less than me. And I don’t think they did know less. Huckabee’s visits to the region were common knowledge well before he became US ambassador to Israel. No one tuned into, say, the doings of Ateret Cohanim or the Hebron Fund or the Shalem Center or the Tikvah Fund–i.e, to the ideological Zionist Right or the East Jerusalem/West Bank settlers movement–would have missed something as obvious as Huckabee’s ideologically charged visits to his Biblical compatriots in this vicinity. This would have been like missing Oskar Schindler in Krakow in the 1940s.

Demoralized shopkeeper, Old City Hebron. He offered me coffee and biscuits, but said little. A few minutes later, a group of settlers came by and told him unceremoniously to close the shop. I was the only customer there, so it may as well have been closed.

I’m not sure I ever literally bumped into Huckabee on the street (as I have Daniel Luria, Yishai Fleisher, Ahmed Qurei, and Salam Fayyad), but I certainly knew of his comings and goings, and would have known where to catch a glimpse of him if I’d cared to. I’m not bragging; I’m just saying. There’s nothing to brag about here.

Similarly, no mainstream journalist would have had to jump through the hoops that Carlson did to land the Huckabee interview. Carlson was known to be hostile to Zionism, but no such claim could have been made of say, Estrin, Goldberg, or Rudoren. So what stopped them? All they had to do was turn on their smart phones and hit dial. They never did.

I once cold-called Daniel Luria of Ateret Cohanim and had an hour-long conversation with him on Tisha b’Av. “I don’t often get calls from strangers in Abu Dis,” he told me. He later had one of his assistants give me a tour of various settlements in East Jerusalem. If he took my call, do you think he would have declined one from the Jerusalem correspondent for The New York Times or the editor of The Atlantic? If he was willing to talk to me–literally the village atheist of Abu Dis–about the Jews’ God-given right to Eretz Israel, do you think he would have passed up the opportunity to discuss the matter with an American Jew working for mainstream media? Luria is smarter and more media-astute than Huckabee, but at the end of the day, if asked the same questions, he would have said the same things as Huckabee. He said them to me.

It was also open to any of these people for decades to have asked the questions that Carlson asked Huckabee. It didn’t take that much imagination to generate Carlson’s questions. They were obvious AF. It just took chutzpah to ask them–chutzpah plus an authentic curiosity about the answers. But that’s what mainstream journalists lack. They simply didn’t give enough of a shit about the truth even for prurient reasons to ask the questions that might have led to it. That’s the one and only redeeming thing about Carlson. He may be dick, but he had enough of a prurient interest in the truth in this one instance to pursue it until he got what he was looking for. Most of these people spend their careers paralyzed by Meno’s Paradox. I give Carlson credit for playing the part of the Socratic sting-ray and swimming on through.

So I guess I have a piece of advice for these people and their Tucker Carlson belly- aching. Come up with something as good as Carlson’s interview on the same topic, then talk. Until then, shut your mouths and learn something for a change. Because you’ve got a lot to learn.